Interrupting Infinity Exclusive Commentary. © 2011 by David St.-Lascaux

2 February 2012: Interrupting Infinity mourns the passing of poet Wisława Szymborska and poet/artist Dorothea Tanning, whose interruptions of infinity dazzled humanity. Interrupting Infinity’s ditton, that life is “a little gleam of Time between two Eternities,” obtains. Today, their poetry and art shine on.

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Here
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak

THE OUROBOROS, A MYTHOLOGICAL SNAKE that eats its tail, is a symbol of self-referential circularity, which a poet does well to avoid, especially when it comes to poems about poetry, or poems that are rehashes of poems one has already written.

Wisława Szymborska’s new collection, Here, commits both poetic sins above, and a third, by providing little of interest, leading to the conclusion that either she or her editors at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt can’t tell the difference, which is highly doubtful.

Szymborska isn’t the only poet who can’t seem to resist the solipsistic lure of explicitly extolling her trade, or of writing for a presumed audience whose members will cling to her every word, and who will wish to learn her thoughts on the craft. She is, however, the only Nobel Prize-winning poet who has written some of the best poems of her time, and that makes her bar higher. If Szymborska wishes to write about poetry, she should – and please, Ms. Szymborska, do! – write an essay or a book. As it is, when seven out of twenty-seven poems, including the closing poem (“In Fact Every Poem”), make specific reference to the practice, it’s as if a brilliant musician were to interrupt each movement with the statement, “And, as you can see, I’m playing music; note well that I’m really talented – in fact, I’m a genius; you are fortunate to be listening to me, etc.” This would be laughable were it not so entirely prevalent among practicing poets (as recent readings around the City anecdotally confirm). But, as I say, her bar higher.

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Unfortunately, Here is mostly reruns further lost in poor translation.

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But first, a lengthy castigation of the translation. Normally, this reviewer prefers to focus on the positive. However, when something is so egregiously incompetent and so fundamentally interferes with the very substance of the material being reviewed, there is no choice. In a nutshell, the translation is horrid. Par exemple, Polish, it turns out, has multiple and ambiguous words for the conjunctives and, but and since, which are loaded words for poets, the use of the first being damned by certain partisans. Szymborska uses these three words liberally. Whether the translators used and when but was meant may be a subjective matter, but the entire elision of either word is unacceptable in a poetry translation. If Szymborska didn’t mean to include and, believe me, she would’ve left it out: that’s how poets think and write, and why translators of poetry need to err toward literality. For example, in the tense, threnodic “Identification,”

A takich koszul pelno jest po sklepach.
A ten zegarek to zwykly zegarek.
A te nasze imiona na jego obraczce

translated as

The stores are bursting with those shirts.
The watch is just a regular old watch.
And our names on that ring…

should translate as

And the stores are bursting with those shirts.
And this watch is just a simple watch.
And those are our names on his wedding ring…

to capture the rhythmic, list-making despair of the bereaved woman.

In “Divorce,” a vulgar English idiom appears that illustrates a challenge in translation – how to translate double entendre:

Dla mebli schody, lomot, woz i przewoz.

translated as

For the furniture, stairs, thuds, my way or the highway.

Here, woz i przewoz is clever, since it literally means car and carriage, which are the two most probable means of by which the furniture will be transported, but also, idiomatically, choice – as in tradeoff. Let the idiom go; the promise of damage either way is quite clear to everyone:

For the furniture, stairs, thuds, car and van.

Given that poetry is entirely about details, the failure of the translators to attend is unforgivable. At the end of “Foraminifera,”

czyli
zachwycajace, wylonione z morza,
lazurowego morza biale skaly,
skaly, ktore tu sa, poniewaz sa.

translated as

or,
rising from the sea,
the azure sea, dazzling white cliffs,
cliffs that are here because they are.

should translate as

or,
dazzling, rising from the sea,
the azure sea, white cliffs,
cliffs that are here because they are.

Relocating the word dazzling, in addition to being gratuitous, matters, because this is a poetry translation, which should honor the original’s poetic form. The rule: If no sense is lost, preserve the poetic original, which in this case, is obviously, intentionally, poetically placed in the Polish text.

Worst of all, there are, regrettably, glaring examples that reveal deficient intellectual grasp of the material and the poet’s musical and compositional intentions, suggesting that the translators are out of their depths, and shouldn’t attempt chess with grandmasters. The most profound example of this relates to the collection’s title, Here (= Tutaj and tu). Throughout, the translators’ treatment of locative words (here, there, nowhere, etc.), appears to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the collection’s very theme, for which Szymborska might have provided them guidance.

In the title poem, no less – “Here,” the translators egregiously omit an explicit, embedded here. And a midpoem initial, repeated For (a pricetag preposition) is simply ignored in a bogus, garbled conceit that again fails to honor poetic repetition:

Zycie na Ziemi wypada dosc tanio.
Za sny na przyklad nie placisz tu grosza.
Za zludzenia – dopiero kiedy utracone.
Za posiadanie ciala – tylko cialem.

translated as

Life on Earth is quite a bargain.
Dreams, for one, don’t charge admission.
Illusions are costly only when lost.
The body has its own installment plan.

A literal translation is far better:

Life on Earth falls quite cheap.
For dreams, for example, you do not pay a penny here.
For illusions – only when lost.
For possession of the body – only the body.

which reveals brilliant poetry in the last line, now comprehensible. Why on earth one would miss the opportunity to translate “possession of the body” and “only the body” precisely as such boggles. Andrzej Duszenko’s translation of this important poem, online here, respects and comprehends the original.

In a second example of location (here) lost, “Foraminifera” begins:

No coz, na przyklad takie otwornice.
Zyly tutaj, bo byly, a byly, bo zyly.
Jak mogly, skoro mogly i jak potrafily.

translated as

Why not, let’s take the Foraminifera.
They lived, since they were, and were, since they lived.
They did what they could since they were able.

should translate as

Well, for example, these Foraminifera.
They lived here, since they existed, and existed, since they lived.
As they could, since they could, and as they were able.

Admittedly, “Foraminifera” is an extremely complex poem, highly gratifying in its polyguity, and Szymborska clearly means the third line to be interpreted polyguously. It’s much more interesting to begin this poem offhand, in midconversation, which the first line does, than to commence, “Why not, let’s take the Foraminifera.” Moreover, the second line contains the collection’s title word: They lived here, and that’s what she wrote. It’s obvious that Szymborska is making a philosophical connection between being, living and acting that benefits from an imaginative leap to existed, and that defines appropriately creative translation (yes, Polish contains a specific word for existed, but translators, if there’s any time to violate literality, it’s here. Remember, the foraminifera are metaphors for us, tak?).

In regard to the third line: This line modifies lived, citing three ways the foraminifera did so, and is emphatically not a new, independent thought. Again, the words taken in order would seem to poetically supersede tortured idiomatic technical accuracy, also lending themselves to the ambiguous temporal and causative implications of since – since when and because, since this poem is about time and effects. Here, the removal of the simple, present and botches the translation and intended meaning.

Because the translation is entirely suspect, it’s difficult to read, let alone evaluate Here. To make matters worse, a no less credible poetic eminence than former United States Poet Laureate Charles Simic previously praised this pair for their translation of Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1994) with the following encomium:

“In these dazzling new translations, Barańczak and Cavanaugh convey the full range of her wit and humor in poems that read as if they were written in English.”

Q.E.D.

But enough of the mere, actual words. We now turn to the ideas presented Here. Essentially the entirety of Here is an extended rerun of earlier, better work, specifically View with a Grain of Sand. Examples in this collection eclipse Here’s tepid scribblings: “Museum” and “Our Ancestors’ Short Lives” preceding ”Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets”; and “The Railroad Station” and “Could Have” preceding “Absence,” for example. And in the realm of the cataclysmic, the vaguish “Labyrinth” and the flippant, unempathic “Divorce” pale compared with “Nothing Has Changed” and “Lot’s Wife.” View is poetry; Here, regrettably, is a rerun.

Overall, Here’s ideas range from lame to weak. Written by an undergraduate, the autobiographical “Teenager” might be a process poem, reflecting a developing voice. However,

she shows me poems,
…
I read the poems, read them.
Well, maybe that one
if it were shorter
and touched up in a couple of places.
The rest do not bode well.

is simply obnoxious: As you well know, almost no other poets’ careers have materially “boded” as well as yours, Ms. Szymborksa.

“An Idea,” about the muse, is simply trite.

You’re right – I say – there are always other poets.
Some of them can do it better.

And?

“In a Mail Coach,” Szymborska’s homage to countryman poet Juliusz Słowacki, is a science fiction travel back in time to the mid-1800’s, and would be a nice few passing paragraphs in a novel. It’s the punch line, delivered two-thirds in, that grates:

I’ve come from the Future and I know how it turns out.
Your poems are loved and admired
and you lie with kings at Wawel Castle.

To cover this point by point: first, having one’s poems appreciated after one’s death may be a boon for academics in search of fresh material, but living 39-40 years, alone and unappreciated, shouldn’t be a goal, posthumous consolation notwithstanding; second, kings, darling, aren’t obsequiously appreciated in all circles, and lying with same might not be a desideratum, as you yourself have written elsewhere; and finally, Thanks a lot for coming from the Future. Why couldn’t you have come from the Past and got me Laid by life?

All is not lost. Here, the titular and first item, is a fine-form, caustic list poem about the benefits of Life on Earth. One of the title poem’s fine stanzas – Szymborska at her best – asserts that

And as an extra, added feature,
you spin on the planets’ carousel for free,
and with it you hitch a ride on the intergalactic blizzard…

reminding the reader that equatorially-based humans each travel 5.3 quadrillion miles per year in a single lap around the sun.

Szymborska’s forays into genetics (“Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets” and “Microcosmos”), the abovementioned anthropomorphized “The Idea,” memories (“Hard Life with Memory” and “Portrait from Memory”), dreams (“Dreams”) and the talented Ella Fitzgerald (“Ella in Heaven”) and Johannes Vermeer (“Vermeer”) feel forced and wide-eyed, sophomoric. And if the best Szymborska can do with Vermeer’s preternatural, lapis lazuli and linen Rijksmuseum masterpiece “Milkmaid” is six lines about how the meek dignify the earth (Note to self: Where have we already read this? And to you, reader: Have you ever seen any empirical evidence of this fantasy?), and how the serendipitous ability of the occasional clichéd human (cue to trundle out Beethoven and Bittová) to create transcendental art justifies the world, she hasn’t made the sale.

Here’s what will work, and really well: To make Here a picture book à la Max Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes, Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, or any of the beautiful commemorative, limited-edition abstract-art-and-poetry collaborations released by Poets House, comprising the very fine title poem, line by line. So Here (the poem), by Wisława Szymborska, illustrated by an excessive artist or photographer. Sometimes, as Goethe was said to have said, “The most difficult thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 09:33 and is filed under Poetry/Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.